In this latest post to his blog Phil Sturgeon looks at how to use the Composer package management tool to install packages directly into your CodeIgniter applications.

If you want to start using Composer components in your application there is no reason why you should not. The code is mainly PHP 5.3 but by slowing moving the majority of your application from framework specific code to generic packages that work in any framework you free yourself from being limited to a specific framework and will find a transition to FuelPHP 2.0, Laravel or Symfony2 much easier in the future.

There's four steps to his process (most of them the usual Composer setup ones): install Composer, create the "composer.json" file, install the needed dependencies and then include_once the Composer autoloader.